The Messengers: Horror. Starring Kristen Stewart, Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller and John Corbett. Directed by Oxide Pang and Danny Pang. (PG-13. 84 minutes. At Bay Area theaters. See complete movie listings and show times, and buy tickets for select theaters, at sfgate.com/movies.)

"The Messengers" isn't a particularly frightening or gory horror movie, but directors Danny and Oxide Pang do have a special talent for torturing the reputations of their actors.

This is a movie that features former "Sex and the City" hunk John Corbett looking more like David Crosby than you can possibly imagine and "The Practice" lawyer Dylan McDermott as a sunflower farmer. Both are subjected to humiliating attacks by flocks of angry crows.

If that sounds like fun, be warned that most of the rest of the film is extremely boring. It's as if someone took the worst 54 minutes of "Places in the Heart" and spliced it with the worst half-hour of "The Grudge 2." Hopefully, this is both the beginning and the end of the agricultural horror genre.

McDermott makes a decent Secret Service agent and a convincing cutthroat attorney. He would probably be a good TV series doctor and could easily pull off a professor or a corporate accountant. But as much as the actor looks good hailing a taxi, he's completely out of place trying to repair a tractor.

Roy (McDermott) has just moved from Chicago to rural North Dakota with his wife, teen daughter and toddler son. It's not a very fun trip, because his spouse (Penelope Ann Miller) is a bit of a shrew, his daughter is a drama queen and his son sees dead people. Corbett adds a little fun when he shows up as a ranch hand, if you can resist the urge to break into "Almost Cut My Hair."

The ghosts in "The Messengers" sneak around Roy's new home, an old fixer-upper that looks like it was designed by "The Amityville Horror" house architect. But this is no old-school haunting -- the Pang brothers have built one of those "Grudge"-"Pulse"-"Ring" universes where anything goes, whether it's black ooze in the basement, crows in the station wagon or scary pale humanoid things skittering across the ceiling. Most of the scares are generated by the soundtrack, which is mixed way too loudly and has sort of a bludgeoning effect that is more annoying than frightening.

Screenwriter Mark Wheaton includes a lot of minutiae about sunflower growing, but he doesn't bother to give the ghosts in "The Messengers" much of a reason for existing. Usually in a movie like this, there's an Indian burial ground that has been violated -- or at least a scene in the last 10 minutes where a main character sifts through newspaper clippings at the library, unraveling a horrible story about a parent who killed his kids.

Instead, we get crows with no motivation, except to make the actors they're attacking look ridiculous. If Tippi Hedren taught us nothing else in "The Birds," pulling off a big-screen bird attack is about more than screaming really loud and flailing your arms.

-- Advisory: This film contains profanity, violence and a few loud scares. There's also a scene where Roy tries to feed his toddler whole carrots, which is a serious choking hazard for a 2-year-old.